Envoi

Summary

It is tempting to see in Proust's rendition of Tristan – clearly the example of opera in the novel most closely connected with actual performance, and no doubt also the most involved passage of counterpoint between operatic composition and literary character ever written – the ne plus ultra of the soirée à l'Opéra. Certainly the obsolescence of its original, theatrical manifestation seems persuasively demonstrated in À la recherche, not only by the enormously enriched reception made possible by its alternative, the explicit collapsing of the performer/audience distinction in the Tristan scene, but also by the petrifaction of the social structure portrayed in the one actual visit to the Palais Garnier described in the book. In the latter there is no music – the occasion is a gala performance of spoken theatre that includes an act of Racine's Phèdre featuring the great actress Berma – but for the Narrator the audience is as calcified as the operatic institution itself:

un panorama éphémère que les morts, les scandales, les maladies, les brouilles modifieraient bientôt, mais qui en ce moment était immobilisé par l'attention, la chaleur, le vertige, la poussière, l'élégance et l'ennui, dans cette espèce d'instant éternel et tragique d'inconsciente attente et de calme engourdissement qui, rétrospectivement, semble avoir précédé l'explosion d'une bombe ou la première flamme d'un incendie. […]